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Something Daring

Wednesday, 16 June 2004

“I write for my pleasure, but publish for money.”
— Vladimir Nabokov

One could argue that this web site is disingenuously named: that
there’s nothing “daring” about Daring Fireball whatsoever. That the
entire thing is rigged by my having constrained it to the handful of
topics about which I am certain I know my shit. That when I put
forth an opinion, I know in advance that I am right.

Such is my nature. I tend only to play games which I’m already good
at, and only to undertake endeavors which I feel certain will be
successful.

Well, here goes something that’s actually daring, and which I have
no idea how it’s going to turn out.

Starting today and running through the end of June, I’m asking you to
support Daring Fireball in one of two ways:

Make a Donation. Contributions of any amount are both
accepted and much appreciated. However, any contribution of
$20.48 (USD) or more qualifies you for a one-year
membership.

It is essential to note that Daring Fireball is and will remain a
free web site. New articles and the complete archive are available
to everyone, free of charge. This is a good thing — it’s the way of
the web. Writers who wish to charge everyone who reads their work
would do well to consider other media.

But then so what is a “membership”?

The idea is that while the articles and main content of Daring
Fireball are free for everyone, paying supporters will have access
to a few members-only features. The first of these is a
full-content RSS feed. The way it works is that after your payment
is complete, you’ll receive an automated email containing a unique
“key”, which can be used to subscribe to the feed using a URL like
this:

http://daringfireball.net/feeds/rss/yourkeyhere

But please, I implore you, do not think of this as paying $20 just
to get a full-content RSS feed. Think of it as a small token of my
gratitude for supporting my writing at this site. It’s like when you
pledge $100 to PBS and they send you a tote bag; no one does it to
get the tote bag.

Why I’m Doing This

The straight truth is that writing Daring Fireball consumes an
immoderate amount of my time, but generates what can at best be
considered a hobbyist-level income. Google’s Fight Club-esque
terms and conditions preclude me from disclosing details (“The first
rule of AdSense is, you do not talk about how much money you make
from AdSense…”), but suffice it to say that I made as much money
writing a single three-page article for Macworld as I’ll
make in an entire year of writing Daring Fireball.

When I’m grinding away on Daring Fireball, am I working, or am I
“working”? Am I starting a career as a writer, or am I just dicking
around?

Daring Fireball has effectively been running deep in the red ever
since it debuted. Not because of the hosting costs, which have been
covered several-fold by the AdSense revenue, but because of the
opportunity cost of the time I spend writing this site. Those who
know that I make a living as a self-employed web
developer/designer/etc. often ask why I don’t advertise my services
here. I don’t really have a good answer for that.

The best I can say is that I don’t want this site to act as a
calling card for my “real” (read: “paid”) writing, or for my “real”
work as a web nerd.

I want Daring Fireball to be my real work. No air-quotes.

I’ve been treating it as such as best I can, to the detriment of my
income and career, and that course is simply no longer sustainable.

Asking for voluntary contributions from readers was my original
vaguely-hashed-out plan for expanding Daring Fireball into a career
as a writer. Which, as far as qualifying as a legitimate business
plan, bears an uncomfortable resemblance to the classic South Park
gnomes-stealing-underware business plan:

Steal underpants.

…

Profit!

It’s only funny because it’s true; “Step 3: Profit!” is effectively
a nutshell description of the plans for hundreds of bankrupt
dot-coms.

The difference with Daring Fireball is that I sort of actually have
a step 2: build a reasonably-sized base of loyal readers who
thoroughly appreciate what it is I’m trying to do here.

Plus, what I mean by “reasonably-sized” is many orders of magnitude
smaller than the goals of a late ’90s dot-com. I’m not looking to
get rich; I’m just trying to make a living.

The debut of AdSense last year gave me another option, which I took
not so much because I honestly expected it to generate serious
revenue, but because it allowed me to put off trying this (“this”
being asking you, loyal reader, to support me directly.) As a hint as
to how long I’ve delayed launching this endeavor, here’s a passage from “Independent Days”, the article I wrote a year ago when I
first started displaying Google ads:

And so here is my plan. Next month will mark Daring
Fireball’s one-year anniversary. At that time I’ll commence
a brief fund-raising drive, asking for voluntary donations.
Perhaps there will be T-shirts and other
Daring-Fireball-logo’d tchotchkes.

In the meantime, the Google ads will continue.

Amazing how easily one month can turn into eleven.

Depth

It’s my guess that reader response will fall along three lines:

A small number of you will jump at the chance to support Daring
Fireball. Perhaps it’s your very favorite site. Perhaps you’re
simply loose with money. Whatever the reason, I salute you.

The large majority of you will neither buy a shirt nor make a
donation. E.g., perhaps you’re just a casual reader. Perhaps
you’re the sort of person who can’t stand the thought of paying
for something that many others are getting for free. That’s OK.
When I say that Daring Fireball will remain free, I mean it. You
owe me nothing. I’m glad to have you as a reader.

Remaining are the fence-sitters, those who are mulling it over.

I suspect the third group, the fence-sitters, far outnumber the
first group, and the success of this endeavor largely hinges on how
many of you end up jumping off on the membership side of the fence.
The pressure I feel writing this, in the hopes of convincing you, is
close to overwhelming.

Part of what makes me so anxious here is that the future of Daring
Fireball is now largely out of my hands. This is not a threat —
i.e. that if this funding drive falls short that I’ll pack up the
site and turn off the lights. No, one way or another, Daring
Fireball will continue. But if the income I derive here remains at
the hobbyist level, I’m only going to be able to devote a hobbyist
amount of time to it, which is significantly less time than what
I’ve poured into it to date. In short, a hobby-level Daring Fireball
will resemble much more a typical weblog — blurb-length posts,
often only to link to articles elsewhere. No cat pictures, but
still.

There’s a flip side, however: if this funding drive is successful
enough that I can legitimately call this a career, Daring Fireball
could get a whole lot better. Two of my favorite things to write
are software reviews and developer interviews. But even though
I’ve been writing this for nearly two years and have published over
200,000 words, I’ve only published a handful of reviews, and even
fewer interviews.

When Daring Fireball debuted, I had planned for it to be chock full
of both. But reviews and interviews — at least Daring
Fireball-style ones — simply take much more time than I’d
anticipated.

I wrote the OmniWeb review over the course of four consecutive days,
morning to night. It’s not so much that the writing took long — but
the research did. My goal with a review isn’t just to launch the app,
click around, and describe the gist of it. The point is to live with
it, not just to try it but to use it. To understand it, and then
to describe it to you. That takes time — especially for anything
other than the apps I already use on a daily basis.

I’ve been criticized occasionally for devoting too much of my
critical attention to software from Apple, as opposed to from small
independent developers. Guilty as charged, no argument here. But
it’s not because I don’t want to write about indie apps, it’s that
writing about indie apps takes so much more time. When I write about
Safari, for example, I can safely assume that you’re already very
much familiar with it, and I can cut to the chase and write only
about a few specific features. Whereas with OmniWeb 5, the reason
it’s so interesting is that it’s a very different browser than
anything else I’ve ever seen.

At least once per month, some new app strikes me as being worth a
detailed review. More often than not, such software is from
independent developers. I simply haven’t had the time to write about
them. But I’d like to.

Same for the interviews — which to date have been exclusively with
individual independent developers. These interviews consume at least
a full week of my time, probably more. (They also consume an awful
lot of the subjects’ time, for which I’m quite appreciative.) First,
they’re just plain long. But what also consumes time is the
back-and-forth. Daring Fireball interviews aren’t conducted with an
up-front list of predetermined questions. I start with a few
openers, but subsequent questions are follow-ups to the initial
answers.

I’ve been using a Mac for almost 15 years, and but I’ve never seen
anyone write about the people who make the Mac world spin — the
developers. Imagine if Rolling Stone only wrote about the music, but
never the musicians. That’s what the nerd press does with software:
you can read about the apps, but never the developers. No matter how
lovely the ones and zeroes are, they’re never as interesting as
people.

The implicit immodesty of the sentence to follow pains me, but here
goes: I don’t think there’s anything else quite like Daring
Fireball.

The OmniWeb 5 review was about 9 printed pages long; the interview
with Tsai 14 pages, and with Simmons, 21. Page counts are not a good
metric of quality, of course. What I strive for isn’t length, per
se, but depth.

Independent Journalism

If you look at this fund raising drive as my asking you to send me
$20 bucks so I can dick around on the Internet, well, I’ve already
lost you.

But if you’re on the fence, there are all sorts of ways I can
justify Daring Fireball being worth a $20 donation. E.g. that it
works out to around $0.40 per week. Or that it’s less than the cost
of a typical book.

The book analogy isn’t a bad one. Daring Fireball has averaged out
to around 100,000 words per year thus far, which is roughly the word
count of a several-hundred-page book. But perhaps this raises the
question as to why I don’t just write a book instead, if I want to
make a career out of writing. And that’s really where the analogy
falls apart — because while it’s not inconceivable that I’ll
someday publish a book, what I really want to write is this. This
site. Fireballs. Which aren’t the sort of pieces that would work in
a book at all.

And so perhaps a better analogy is to independent Mac developers.
I.e. to think of me as an independent Mac journalist, and to think
of your donation to support my writing as loosely equivalent to the
registration fees you pay to support independent developers.

This feels right to me, but like any analogy, it’s not completely
watertight. For one thing, very little professional software these
days is actually truly “shareware”, meaning “please pay if you like
it”. Professional software, even from the smallest independent
developers, is licensed such that you must pay for it if you
continue to use it past the demo.

That’s because the voluntary shareware model just doesn’t work as a
means to generate a livelihood. What works are things like demo
periods (“try the full app for 30 days”) or feature-limitations
(“use the light version for free, pay to get the pro version with
more features”). The idea is not to nag, but rather to provide an
impetus to act.

Daring Fireball is a web site, not an app, so the idea of a “demo
period” is not applicable. (Perhaps the members-only full-content
RSS feed could be considered a “pro” feature, however.)

Hence, the limited two-week period for fund raising. This is not the
sort of thing where I’ll be incessantly asking for donations
year-round. Just these last two weeks of June, the money raised
during which will determine where Daring Fireball goes from here.

One Last Word

Don’t conflate “journalism” with “objectivity”. Striving for
objectivity — taking no sides, casting no opinions — has taken all
the life out of modern corporate journalism. Daring Fireball is
unabashedly subjective, but, I hope, never at the expense of accuracy
or genuine insight. Above all else, what I’m going for here isn’t so
much to be entertaining, or even informative, but to be engaging.

I am trying to write the shit out of this stuff.

Asking you to take notice of what it is I’m trying for, what it is
that I hope makes Daring Fireball different, seems rather uncouth.
That asking Do you feel it? is perilously close to asking Do you
like me? That by even alluding to it, it breaks the implicit
author/reader contract.

But I need to impress upon you just how serious I am about this, and
I see no other way to do so than to step out from behind the curtain
just this once to address you directly, author to reader, with
nothing but 100 percent honesty.

No stagecraft. No artifice. Just me, your humble author, hat in
hand, heart in throat, asking for your support.